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Conduct Task Analysis
- What is a task analysis?
- What can you learn from a task analysis?
- How do you conduct a task analysis?
- What are the benefits of a task analysis?
What is a task analysis?
A task analysis complements user analysis. (See the article on Learn About Your Users.)
Task analysis means learning about your users' goals—what they want to do at your Web site-and your users' ways of working. Task analysis can also mean figuring out what more specific tasks users must do to meet those goals and what steps they must take to accomplish those tasks. Along with user and task analysis, we often do a third analysis: understanding users' environments (physical, social, cultural, and technological environments).
Segmenting your target audiences by their main goals focuses your site's development on those users' tasks.
What can you learn from a task analysis?
According to JoAnn Hackos and Janice (Ginny) Redish, authors of User and Task Analysis for Interface Design, user and task analysis focuses on understanding:
- what users' goals are; what they are trying to achieve
- what users actually do to achieve those goals
- what personal, social, and cultural characteristics the users bring to the tasks
- how users are influenced by their physical environment
- how users' previous knowledge and experience influence how they think about their work and the workflow they follow to perform their tasks
How do you conduct a task analysis?
When we do a task analysis, we can work at several different levels (sometimes called "levels of granularity"). We can ask:
- What overall tasks are users trying to accomplish at our Web site? Examples of tasks might be:
- find a nursing home near you for an elderly relative
- get information about options for treatment for skin cancer
- sign up to receive an email notice when a payment is due
We can also ask questions that help us understand the specific steps that people take or should take to do that task:
- How do people currently do that task? We can look at how people do the task:
- off the Web
- on our Web site now
- on other Web sites where they do the same or similar tasks
- What's the most efficient way to have people do that task at our Web site?
- How well does the most efficient way match the users' logic—their ways of thinking about the task, their words, their ways of working?
What are the benefits of a task analysis?
A task analysis allows you to:
- discover what tasks your Web site must support
- determine the appropriate scope of content for your Web site
- decide what applications your Web site should include
- refine or redefine the navigation or search for your Web site to better support users' goals—to make sure the site is efficient, effective, and satisfying to users
- build specific Web pages and Web applications that match users' goals, tasks, and steps
Next steps
When you have learned about your users and done task analysis, you are ready to Develop Personas.
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